Astonishing errors

edit As I do every year, I'm in the midst of reviewing papers for the upcoming Academy of Management in August. The quality of the writing has always bugged me, but I particularly notice it when I go through a lot of papers. Typos, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and mis-citations galore. What is disturbing is that this material is being sent to an academic conference on the presumption that it represents high quality social science, and that we as consumers of that research should believe what the authors are saying. And yet, they can't even write properly and in correct English. As I said in my review comments to one author: If something as simple as typing text is so error-prone, how can you expect me to believe that the rest of your research is not as sloppy? Just amazing.

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Academic obviousness

edit I recently returned from the Academy of Management Meetings in Hawaii (now there's a sight for you - 7,000 academics running wild on Waikiki beach...). I continue to be struck by the way in which academics are not researching questions that managers are worried about, and by the way in which the answers do not appeal to managers in practice. Or worse, by the way in which academic research discovers the obvious. Here's one from a paper I've just reviewed - seems that competition increasingly has to do with innovation, not just efficiency. Wow. Let me write that one down.

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